Book Excerpt: A Grab at Kashmir

Kewal Singh arrived in Karachi on 5 August 1965, riding on hope and confidence in a relationship that on balance seemed headed in a positive direction, despite the difficult years since the 1962 war. The Kutch run-in of April seemed to have reached a fair diplomatic resolution. Unusually, the designated high commissioner in Karachi got an appointment for his credentials ceremony the day after his arrival in the new capital of Islamabad. The seat of the federal government had already moved to Islamabad, while the Indian high commission and other diplomatic missions were gearing up to move into new premises over the next few years. Singh was pleasantly surprised by this alacrity in Pakistan’s response; it was a good sign, this goodwill from his hosts. At the ceremony for which he flew in from Karachi, Singh spoke with emotion and nostalgia: he had spent the first thirty years of his life in what was now Pakistan. Ayub struck a similar high note—he pledged to reciprocate every move from India for better understanding. The bonhomie would last exactly three days. While the president and the envoy had been exchanging pleasant sentiments of peace and reciprocal goodwill, a war was building up at the border. A day earlier, as the high commissioner had landed in Karachi, 2,000 armed infiltrators, dressed as tribesmen, had walked stealthily from Muzaffarabad into the Indian part of Kashmir, to begin a campaign of arson and violence. 5 August was to become a day marked in red in Kashmir’s calendar, more than half a century before the abrogation of its special status on that very date. Kewal Singh morphed rapidly into a wartime diplomat. He had received troubling reports from Delhi—of several batches of well-armed Pakistani military personnel in civilian clothes perpetrating a well-planned agenda of violence and sabotage in Kashmir. Indian forces were engaging these outsiders, arresting scores of them and killing many in skirmishes. But more kept coming.

On 8 August, India’s home minister, Gulzari Lal Nanda, revealed to the media after an emergency cabinet meeting that armed men from Pakistan had infiltrated India and were fomenting ‘disturbances’. On 9 August, Prime Minister Shastri instructed the envoy in Karachi to lodge a strong protest with Ayub Khan against Pakistan’s aggression and to warn its leadership that unless the infiltrations were stopped immediately, the consequences for bilateral relations would be grave.Singh worked the phones but failed to get a meeting with Ayub At 7 p.m. on 10 August, however, Singh was granted an audience with Foreign Minister Bhutto. The young minister, identified later as a key driver of Pakistan’s 1965 gambit, was dismissive of India’s démarche. He was belligerent and aggressive through the meeting, insisting that what was happening was an open revolt by Kashmiris against ‘India’s military occupation’. In Pakistan, Foreign Secretary Aziz Ahmed was in the dark. He later revealed2 that he was taken aback by reports in the press on 9 August. He did not know of the operation; the number of armed men who were reported to have crossed the ceasefire line particularly surprised him. Once again, this demonstrated that the civilians were only reacting to decisions already taken by the military, even though Bhutto played a key role. The briefing messages from Delhi told the envoy that more than a hundred raiders were killed in the first five days of the operation and scores arrested. He also learnt that ‘most of the raiders belonged to the Pakistan Army and were well-equipped with Sten guns, rifles and explosives’. The raiders of Kashmir were soon making international headlines. The Washington Post was explaining to its readers that this event was Pakistan’s Bay of Pigs, referring to the failed landing operation of Cuban exiles that had been launched by the CIA less than five years earlier in April 1961. The implication was that this Pakistani attempt to grab territory in Kashmir would fail, as had the US attempt to reverse Cuba’s Castro revolution.

GIBRALTAR TO LAHORE

In Karachi, Bhutto was pleased at this turn of events. As an ambitious young politician within a military regime, an India hawk, and foreign minister since 1963, he had been pushing Ayub for a while for a military solution in Kashmir. He had been arguing with the full force of his Berkeley law degree that Pakistan’s ingress into the disputed territory would not invite an Indian response on the international boundary (as indeed it did not in 1947–48) simply because it would be illegal; while a war in disputed territory was kosher, an attack across the international boundary, Bhutto felt, would invite international opprobrium. This argument had weighed heavy in Ayub’s war calculus.4 Pakistan’s despatch of raiders into Kashmir was code-named Operation Gibraltar—named after the Muslim conquest of Spain from the Strait of Gibraltar. The plan had been developed in the 1950s, drawing inspiration from the first Kashmir war of 1947–48. It was now executed by Ayub’s army as an ‘attack by infiltration’ by an irregular force that would eventually grow to 40,000 highly motivated and heavily armed men. It was preceded by a meticulous ‘Operation Nusrat’, launched to find gaps in the ceasefire line that the mujahideen could use as entry points to assess the response of the Indian Army and locals in Kashmir. The fighting was to be confined to Kashmir in order ‘to defreeze the Kashmir problem, weaken Indian resolve, and bring India to the conference table without provoking general war’.5 The August incursion, denied at the time, later had a glib official explanation. This was Pakistan’s reluctant recourse to the military option, its spokesmen said, given the popular uprising in Indian Kashmir and the dashed hopes for a peaceful settlement. Major General Akhtar Hussain Malik, who prepared the scheme, had called for incursions by ‘Kashmiri volunteers into India-held Kashmir’.6 The move was based on three assumptions: the people in Kashmir would rise in support of the guerrillas, a large-scale Indian offensive against Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (POK) was unlikely, and the possibility of attacks across the international border could be ruled out. All three, in Pakistan’s own official account, turned out to be wrong.

International alarm bells were ringing soon enough. In the second week of August, UN Secretary General U Thant visited India and Pakistan. These were innocent times, when India still would allow conversations with eager external peacemakers. The major world powers were not in a hurry to jump in directly. They had seen the slanging matches between India and Pakistan on Kashmir over the previous couple of decades and were already ‘bored stiff’.8 Within India, the outrage was mounting. Even in the midst of the crisis, Prime Minister Shastri read the situation clearly. He said in a broadcast to the nation on 13 August 1965: …there is no doubt that this is a thinly disguised armed attack on our country organised by Pakistan and it has been made as such…. the world will recall that Pakistan created a similar situation in 1947, and then also she initially pleaded innocence. Later, she had to admit that her regular forces were involved in the fighting. Pakistan’s line was one of stout denial. Bhutto was now pushing the public spin he had used privately with the Indian envoy: that since India had closed all doors to a peaceful solution of J&K, the people of the state had been driven to rebellion and Pakistan’s sympathies were with them.

—

Diplomatic relations had not been severed in August but this now seemed imminent. High Commissioner Kewal Singh in Karachi was worried about the classified records and documents at his mission falling into enemy hands. He had already worked out a deal with Delhi to have officers carry trunks by successive flights over two months to deliver these secret records to New Delhi. An attaché, Bhaumik, had already been dispatched on 27 August with the first instalment of documents; Bhaumik had volunteered for the assignment since he wanted to bring back his mother to take care of his pregnant wife, but eventually could not make it back for a couple of months. Singh was bracing for a raid on the mission and seizure of these secret documents, which, in his dark fantasy, would be published daily in Dawn with provocative headlines. On the battlefront, India’s counteroffensive was on. By the end of August, Indian forces had occupied large chunks of territory in the Kargil area in the north of Kashmir and around the Haji Pir pass between Uri and Poonch. On 1 September, Pakistan struck again, launching Operation Grand Slam, deploying tanks in Chhamb in the Jammu area, to cut off Kashmir from Indian Punjab. Pakistan’s diplomatic script remained to argue that India was forcing a war on it. President Ayub in his broadcast on 1 September alleged that the Kashmiris had risen in open revolt, that Pakistan had only offered sympathy and support to these valiant fighters against Indian tyranny. Given the communications of those times, the high commissioner and his team in Karachi were oblivious to the details of the action on the borders. Very little information was trickling in from headquarters. Media reporting was unreliable and biased. The Pakistan media hardly mentioned the all-out attack that had been launched by the Pakistan Army supported by the Pakistan Air Force and some 70 Patton tanks in the Chhamb area.

Kewal Singh recalled in his memoirs that he would have acted differently had he known even a fraction of the reality on the ground that evening. Thanks to his ignorance, and driven by personal goodwill towards his host, Singh even set out on 3 September to attend a marriage reception in Rawalpindi, hosted by Pakistan’s finance minister Mohammed Shoaib for his son. Singh overruled the advice of the Indian liaison officer in Islamabad, the Lahore-born G. L. Puri, who was worried about the impending outbreak of war. He realized ‘the folly of my decision’ when he walked into the Rawalpindi club, a representative of an enemy country in the midst of war, to attend an event where the eyes of Pakistan’s military and civilian elites were upon him. Singh saw the surprise of his hosts and rapidly left the soiree.9 He would later get a measure of the level of hostility when he saw a newspaper item that said that the sari gifted by the Indian high commission for the wedding was sold by his hosts to raise funds for Pakistan’s war effort.10 The international community was getting increasingly alarmed by the hostilities. On 4 September, the UNSC passed the first resolution on the conflict, calling for a ceasefire. But the situation on the ground was evolving rapidly. When High Commissioner Singh returned to Karachi from his social misadventure in Rawalpindi on 5 September, he got into a huddle with his colleagues to take stock of the conflict. The rapid descent towards full-blown war seemed imminent. But if the situation was fast drifting in that direction, he should have received from headquarters ‘a number of warning signals required by the war book of any foreign office’. What he had instead was radio silence from Delhi. For an India at war, that post in Karachi, deep within enemy territory, was either forgotten or not a priority. On the border, India was acting decisively. The substantive Indian response to Pakistan’s Kashmir offensive came with speed and surprise. India launched a counteroffensive action in the shape of a march towards Lahore on 6 September. India’s action in Punjab, to open another front, showed Shastri’s leadership, and also that India’s war-fighting capability— the systemic strength of its army and the collective wisdom of its cabinet— was intact, implying that decisions of war and peace could be made with institutional efficiency even in the post-Nehru era.

—

As Indian troops marched towards Lahore, the Indian high commission team in Karachi, oblivious to battlefield reports, scrambled to hear President Ayub Khan’s special broadcast to the nation. They learnt from Ayub that the Indian Army had attacked the Lahore front, a sequel to India’s ‘aggression of the past five months’. Ayub informed his nation that Pakistan was at war and declared an emergency. He chose not to refer to the infiltrators of Kashmir but spoke of the familiar trope of those times, of India having never reconciled to the establishment of an independent Pakistan where Muslims could build a homeland of their own. Pakistani war hero and politician, Air Marshal Asghar Khan, later assessed that even as late as 4 September, Ayub did not feel that the Indians would react so strongly.11 He was misled by false assurances and a misreading of the situation by his foreign minister, Bhutto, who was forcefully making the legal argument, as we have noted, that since Kashmir was a disputed territory, the Indians would not dare to move on the settled international border. Bhutto had shouted down the military view that an adversary attacked on the throat may choose to retaliate with a knife to the gut. Later accounts from Pakistan admit that the official propaganda during the war had built up an impression of Pakistani forces having gained a great advantage, if not victory, over India. Not for the first time, Pakistan’s state propaganda deluded its own people and even its leaders.

The high commission staff in Karachi were now in ‘lockdown’ mode— all personnel had been asked to remain in the chancery office or in the two India-owned residential buildings, Shivaji Court and Hindustan Court. With all his staff in virtual house arrest, the HC needed to take a critical wartime decision about when to destroy classified papers. Political counsellor K. S. Bajpai, in charge of burning the records, piped up with a pertinent question. (Bajpai would later be appointed high commissioner in Islamabad after the 1971 war.) Were the two countries really at war? Did Ayub’s broadcast to the nation amount to a declaration of war? The argument was that a technical declaration of war was essential before the countries went about the business of dealing with their diplomatic missions, property, and personnel as warring countries should. After debating this issue without conclusion, the good bureaucrats decided to ask their host country for a clarification—were the countries indeed at war? Deputy High Commissioner Prakash Kaul was rushed to the foreign office. He politely asked his interlocutors in Karachi if their countries were at war, and if so, whether steps would be taken to protect the diplomatic missions under the Vienna Convention. He received a prompt bureaucratic reply that the matter would be referred to the appropriate authorities: ‘We cannot answer such questions without reference to Islamabad and shall get in touch with the High Commission later.’ Effectively, in the midst of a major border war, Pakistan’s officials were telling Indian diplomats that they were unsure whether their countries were really at war. As it turned out, neither government formally declared war or thought of closing down diplomatic missions.

Nevertheless, fearing a sudden attack on India’s premises, the high commissioner and his team started a bonfire on 7 September to burn the classified documents and cipher codes. They also gathered most staff and families into the chancery premises to forestall angry mobs attacking the residences. Sentiment against India was ratcheting up in Karachi and the enemy’s diplomatic representation suddenly was a vulnerable target. On 8 September, a contingent of armed police descended upon the home of Frank Dewars, first secretary at the high commission. Some ten policemen and an officer, armed with guns and bayonets, barged in to begin ransacking the family’s belongings and throwing things out. The police officer on duty said that he had orders from his superiors to search for a secret transmitter sending messages to India from within the building, Hindustan Court. Kewal Singh and his deputy Kaul pushed back against the police team. The excitable Kaul was livid and demanded the cops leave immediately. He yelled at the bearded superintendent, ‘O, Darhiwale… are you not ashamed of yourself? How dare you enter these diplomatic premises, without our permission and frighten women and children in this barbaric manner? Will you and your men get out of the premises immediately!’ The superintendent grinned provocatively and said he had orders to look for a secret transmitter.13 Kaul burst out, ‘That is a stupid pretext to harass and insult the families of the high commission. What the Pakistan government is doing has not happened in the 200 years of diplomatic history of the world. You will pay for this.’ Kewal Singh tried to calm down his deputy and asked him to contact the foreign office. Kaul did so and was assured that a ‘protocol officer’ would arrive immediately. Kaul also telephoned the foreign media, representatives of AFP and the New York Times. He was still speaking to the New York Times correspondent when his phone went dead. When the protocol officer arrived, Kaul protested strongly and the officer in turn protested to the superintendent of police. The policeman snarled at the civilian, ‘just vanish unless you want trouble.’ The orders were clearly coming from authorities other than the foreign office.

Similar scenes were repeated in Shivaji Court, where gun-toting policemen were ransacking boxes and cupboards while the officials and their wives and children were made to sit along the corridors. To Kewal Singh the whole exercise seemed intended to frighten and humiliate the families. ‘So sad, so crude and so utterly meaningless.’ This, he felt, did not represent Pakistani culture and stemmed from minds that were poisoned by consuming hatred. More was to follow. As the high commissioner drove to his residence in Clifton in the late evening, he saw soldiers surrounding his own residence. He asked his driver to take a detour to the residence of the Sri Lankan high commissioner. General Wickrama Wijyekhoon received his Indian counterpart warmly and the two diplomats discussed the conflict, the destruction of records and the police searches. The Indian high commissioner requested Wijyekhoon to send a message to his government to be conveyed to our high commissioner in Colombo about the conversation they had. He agreed to do so. But Singh later discovered that he never did act upon the request. The Sri Lankan diplomat’s decision, the Indian diplomat realized, was correct according to international convention. A diplomat was not supposed to send messages on behalf of a country that was at war with his host government. Kewal Singh’s Pakistani counterpart in Delhi was more fortunate, though. For the Pakistani high commission in New Delhi, Singh later learnt, two embassies continued to act as a channel to send detailed communications to Islamabad. But Singh was disappointed in his Sri Lankan counterpart: he should have at least sent a situation report, which the Indian mission had no means of sending.14 When Kewal Singh reached home, he found about two dozen soldiers guarding each gate. Some police officers had been all over the house in his absence for a perfunctory inspection.

They took away a radio set, a revolver, and a visitors’ book. Also, at Hindustan Court and Shivaji Court, radios, transistors, and firearms had been taken away by the police. The radio sets were missed most by the high commission since they were the only means to access information of the war. The high commissioner tried to catch some sleep after a harrowing day, spent visiting the scenes of the searches and meeting frightened families. But he never got that well-deserved rest. First Secretary Amar Singh knocked on his door at 2.30 a.m. with grim news. The chancery had now been occupied by hundreds of Pakistani policemen and officers, who had sent a police jeep to summon the HC to the office. Kewal Singh bristled at the ‘stupidity’ of the Pakistani officers in calling for him and officiously declared he would be available only to the president, the foreign minister, and the foreign secretary. But he soon changed his mind—concerned at the trouble at the office—and followed the police jeep in his own car. At the chancery, the policemen appeared ‘sullen’, having found only empty cupboards since secret documents had been incinerated already. They were still ostensibly looking for the mysterious transmitter. They left soon.

The next night, the Indian high commissioner was summoned by Foreign Secretary Aziz Ahmed at 1.30 in the morning. Knowing Ahmed’s aggressive style, Singh anticipated a stormy session and kept reminding himself to be calm even if provoked or insulted. When he arrived, Singh smiled as he greeted the foreign secretary, who ‘scowled grimmer than usual’ and curtly asked him to sit down for a meeting that would be forty minutes long, ‘the most unpleasant I have ever faced’. Ahmed started by shouting about the treacherous aggression launched by the ‘rabid Hindu leaders’ who had evil designs against Pakistan for a long time. He fulminated, increasingly incoherent, about Kashmir and Indian tyranny and aggression. Singh intervened with a smile to say that he had already sent a note to the foreign office saying that the armed raiders from Pakistan should be stopped forthwith from entering Kashmir, as otherwise it could lead to grave consequences. The foreign secretary interrupted him rudely and spoke of the ‘Hindu fascists in New Delhi who should be made to realise that instead of their evil designs to undo Pakistan, this misadventure by India would lead to its own disintegration’.15 Kewal Singh remained pointedly polite, saying that he would convey these serious warnings and threats to his government ‘provided you open my communication channels with New Delhi’.

He would then report not just these messages but also of the ‘raid on the Chancery, the police searches of all the houses and personal possessions including my own and the police harassment and humiliation of the Indian families’.16 This further infuriated the foreign secretary who ‘kept up his rant’. At this point, the high commissioner rose to say that unless the foreign secretary had something more worthwhile to say, he would leave. He left without a handshake or a goodbye. The next weeks for the high commissioner were spent in an information vacuum. He was virtually under house arrest, completely cut off from the outside world—without radio or telephone communications or visitors. After four days, his butler was finally allowed to go out once a day, with a military escort, to buy foodstuffs or tinned provisions. The high commissioner remained unaware of what was happening on the war front or to some 300 members of the Indian diplomatic staff and families in Karachi. It was only on 28 September that an army officer of the rank of brigadier arrived in a jeep to announce that the high commissioner was now permitted to go from the residence to the chancery building with a military escort. This told Kewal Singh that the war may have ended.

While Kewal Singh was incommunicado, the border war and global diplomacy had taken several twists and turns. Amidst the battles on the ground, China had stayed its military hand but rushed to the diplomatic aid of its new partner. On 16 September, China delivered an ultimatum, asking India to dismantle its ‘military structures on the Chinese side of the border’ within three days. For India, the danger of a second military front opening to the north seemed real. But the Chinese threat later proved to be a hollow one. The USSR and the US also stayed aside pointedly, preferring global diplomacy at the UN. The perils of the expansion of the war triggered a UN Security Council resolution on 20 September that went beyond past texts to call for a ‘settlement of the political problems underlying the present conflict’. The ceasefire was finally announced on 23 September. Getting out of his four weeks of enforced seclusion, the high commissioner also learnt of the travails that his staff had gone through. A baby had been delivered at the chancery with no outside medical assistance. A mob had attacked the chancery premises on 21 September, with 200 people shouting obscene slogans; an hour later, another fierce group, a thousand-strong this time, arrived at the scene with a truckload of stones, which they tossed into India’s premises, with improvised explosives and kerosene bombs.

Fortunately, the building survived this orchestrated attack. The Indian staff was enraged, not just at the mobs and at Pakistan, but also at their own government, which had abandoned them in the heart of enemy territory during the war. Deputy High Commissioner Kaul was vocally critical of his own government and leadership that had failed them. High Commissioner Kewal Singh and his political counsellor K. S. Bajpai tried gamely to soothe the distraught staff and explain that the leadership in the ministry and the country was perhaps too preoccupied with the war to be able to attend to their situation in the high commission. Kaul was unrelenting in his rage against the abandoning of the mission by the ministry and India’s leadership. Singh reflected in his memoirs that while he understood Prime Minister Shastri’s preoccupations, things might have been different if Nehru were still alive. He would probably have checked on the welfare of the mission through his foreign secretary, asked him to get reports on how diplomatic staff and their families were faring in Karachi and Dacca through friendly diplomatic missions or by approaching the UN or the International Red Cross. Trying as the situation was, Kewal Singh later felt it could have been a lot worse. His heart missed a beat when he read about what happened to the US embassy in Iran when the Revolutionary Guards took over its premises in November 1979, and kept over sixty diplomatic staff captive for 444 days.

The Iranians had painstakingly put together all shredded records and published them over the next few months, to the considerable embarrassment of the US administration, and jeopardized many high placed Iranians who were mentioned in these records. At the US embassy in Tehran in 1979, several barriers had to be overcome before the armed militia got their hands on the classified material. But at the Indian high commission in Karachi in 1965, only a glass door had separated the records from the intruders. All through the crisis of 1965, it did not occur to either country to withdraw its envoy from the enemy nation or expel theirs. War was not formally declared, diplomatic ties were not cut, the high commissions remained operational. This was an undeclared war; diplomatic communication, however shrill, was maintained. This diplomatic situation paralleled the one of 1947 to 1949, where despite bloodshed on the border, the conflict barely made it to the formal bilateral agenda.

—

The post-mortem of the war has extended across several decades. Later writings confirm that Pakistan’s strategic objectives were to ‘defreeze’ the Kashmir problem and weaken Indian resolve, forcing India to negotiate on the Kashmir issue, without provoking a general war. About two decades earlier, Pakistan had used similar tactics in its attempt to capture Kashmir. Once again, in 1965, Pakistan had made a critical error of assuming that Kashmir was a ‘ripe fruit’ about to fall into its lap. And thirty-four years later, Pakistan would make the same miscalculation in Kargil—of launching a ‘deniable’ infiltration led by irregulars, hoping to capture some border territory in a conflict limited to Kashmir, and to bring India to the negotiating table through renewed international attention. The 1965 war infused deep distrust into the bilateral relationship. This distrust would deepen with another war in six years. More broadly, India’s wars of the 1960s, starting with 1962, became decisive factors in ending the trust generated by the diplomacy of the 1950s. India had to grapple with its security vulnerabilities both to its north and to the west. The trauma and horrors of Partition had perhaps generated an impulse for constructive state-building and trustful diplomacy, but the wars of the 1960s ended India’s period of strategic naiveté, as they underlined the need for a strong security sensibility to protect the state from adversarial neighbours. Most analysts of the time saw the war as a military stalemate.

Some others felt that while India did not win the war, Pakistan in fact lost it since it failed as the aggressor to secure its objectives of conquering Kashmir or even of ‘defreezing’ the Kashmir issue. In Pakistan’s internal assessment, the war was soon interpreted as the culmination of the rise and fall of expectations of a peaceful settlement of the Kashmir dispute. Pakistan had been agitated over India’s legal manoeuvres since October 1963 to erode the disputed and even the ‘special’ status of Kashmir. Nehru had made it clear in November 1963 that a gradual erosion of the special status of Kashmir was in progress, even as Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed had been installed in power through rigged elections. Pakistan’s planners were also deluded into believing that the inflamed sentiment in Kashmir following the theft of the holy relic in 1963 was a pro-Pakistan movement. India’s march towards greater military strength was seen in Pakistan as interrupted by a post-Nehru transition. In a strategic sense, Pakistan assessed that the window was closing on its opportunity to precipitate a military solution in Kashmir. Pakistani writers refer to the hubris of the Kutch victory, but a deeper attitude problem defined the Pakistani military makeup at that point. Ayub Khan held the bigoted notion that Hindu morale would not stand more than a couple of hard blows at the right time and place.18 While Ayub blamed Bhutto and some of his generals for their flawed counsel, the ruling dictator could not escape the lion’s share of the blame; even the failure of the talks between Swaran Singh and Bhutto after the 1962 war was later pinned on Ayub. He was seen as having missed the opportunity for diplomacy to achieve a breakthrough towards a settlement of the Kashmir issue, in conformity with the aspirations of the people. He had then fallen into a military trap with a war that did nothing to further the Kashmir cause. Reinforcing the assessment of his reluctance to own the conflict, Ayub was silent on the 1965 war in his memoirs published in 1967.19 Some Pakistani writers hold him responsible for both wars—1965 and the one to follow in 1971.

Pakistani analysts also rue the fact that while China did support Pakistan diplomatically, the US failed to do so. The cold US reaction became a matter of deep disappointment in Pakistan. There was no meeting of SEATO or CENTO, the US remained pointedly neutral, the UK was unresponsive. Pakistan was getting increasingly disillusioned with the US and arguing that they were ‘power drunk’ and that Pakistan was seeking friends, not new masters. As we’ve seen, Pakistan had tried through the 1960s to garner from the US some political support for its core interest—the Kashmir cause. It also sought arms to realize a military solution. The US did back Pakistan on the global stage, pushing a UN resolution on Kashmir in 1962 that aggressively called for direct negotiations to resolve the dispute. But this was blocked by the hundredth Soviet veto at the UN on 22 June 1962, thanks to India’s warming ties with the Soviet Union. Pakistan did try to invoke the 1959 agreement during its war in 1965 but the US argued that the action clause could only be triggered exclusively by aggression by a communist state. This is cited by Pakistani analysts as one of the first in a series of acts of American perfidy towards Pakistan. However, US arms supplies had continued, with Pakistan initiating its military adventure against India in 1965, armed with Patton tanks and fighter aircraft of US manufacture. Nevertheless, US support was tempered, as we will see, by larger geopolitical concerns—the need to balance communist China with democratic India that translated into lukewarm political support for Pakistan in 1962 and a hands-off posture in 1965. Disappointed by the failure of its Western alliances in 1965, Pakistan attempted to cobble together another short-lived foreign policy precept of ‘bilateralism’, distinguished from non-alignment, which was a policy that in effect sought to distance Pakistan from the west and open windows to the east. Bhutto later tried to convert this into a doctrine of international relations but this hasty innovation did not survive beyond Bhutto’s tenure as foreign minister.

K. S. Shankar Bajpai, a thoughtful young Indian diplomat at the chancery in wartime Karachi, felt disappointed by India’s approach. India, he felt, should have prolonged the war and not surrendered the advantage. Reflecting on the conflict decades later, Bajpai noted that Bhutto had long been contemplating an ‘Algeria-type situation’ for Kashmir, inspired by the referendum in Algeria that got it independence from the colonial French in 1961. But Pakistan had finally decided on a military solution since ‘the hawks won Ayub over when Washington’s fitful disenchantments with Pakistan started strangling vital American aid’. Pakistan’s logistical problems were sharper than India’s; neither side could fight a long war, but a ‘briefly longer war was feasible’. Bajpai pointed out that even the army chief Sam Manekshaw ‘openly regretted that we missed our chance’. Bajpai argued that ‘a state accustomed to handling power might at least have considered the intriguing political consequences of delaying the ceasefire.’ On the long-term meaning of 1965, Bajpai felt that it demonstrated Pakistan’s obsession with Kashmir. Pithily summarizing ties in the twentieth century, Bajpai observed that:

The 1965 war was born of 1962, which left us looking like bumblers…. We foiled Pakistan’s resulting adventure, doubtless an achievement, albeit limited, but it turned Pakistan to other means: fomenting dissidence in our Punjab, feeding subversion elsewhere, developing terror as an instrument of policy, apart from making life difficult in J&K, while scheming its way to nuclear power. All comprehensively demonstrating an undying obsession—doing India down, wresting J&K.

The article is an excerpt from the book Anger management: The troubled diplomatic relationship between India and Pakistan written by Ajay Bisaria.